Posts on Facebook claim that homeware retailer Argos is giving away free TVs and users can win one by interacting with a Facebook post.
Facebook posts that claim you can win electronic goods just for liking or sharing are common on the Internet’s most popular social media platform. However, such posts are typically scams designed at luring Facebook users to third party data harvesting websites.
Examples of these types of scams are below.
Such posts are like-farming posts. Like-farming refers to the various techniques that spammers use to trick Facebook users into engaging with Facebook posts by using deception, manipulation or exploitation.
In this case, since the spammers are pretending to represent Argos (and because there aren’t really any TVs being given away) then the posts above are clearly deceptive.
The idea of these posts is to lure Facebook users to websites outside of Facebook that are known to collect (harvest) personal information from visitors. While the Facebook user may believe they are signing up to win or collect a free TV set, in reality they are handing over their personal information to spammers, which is likely to be used to spam the user, or worse, use their information to commit identity theft.
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As always, there are some sure ways to spot these types of scams.
First, the Facebook pages that post them are not the official Facebook pages of the respective brands. For instance, these posts are not from the blue tick verified Facebook page belonging to Argos.
Secondly, Facebook’s Page Transparency Tool reveals the Facebook pages are only a handful of days or weeks old.
Thirdly, the Facebook pages attempt to lure users off of Facebook and on to third party websites, and such websites do not belong to the respective brand. In this instance, the websites do not belong to Argos.
Read this post when we clicked through on one of these scams to see what happened.